People & Histories
16 March 1846 – 1947

The Treaty of Amritsar and Dogra Rule

Britain sells the Kashmir Valley to the Dogra ruler of Jammu, Gulab Singh, for 7.5 million rupees, creating the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir under a Hindu dynasty ruling a mostly Muslim people.

  • Hindu Rulers, Muslim Subjects: Islam, Rights, and the History of Kashmir — Mridu Rai, Princeton University Press (2004)
  • The Valley of Kashmir — Walter R. Lawrence, Henry Frowde (1895)
  • Languages of Belonging: Islam, Regional Identity, and the Making of Kashmir — Chitralekha Zutshi, Hurst (2004)
  • Understanding Kashmir and Kashmiris — Christopher Snedden, Hurst (2015)
  • Kashmir: Roots of Conflict, Paths to Peace — Sumantra Bose, Harvard University Press (2003)
  • Kashmir in Conflict: India, Pakistan and the Unending War — Victoria Schofield, I.B. Tauris (2000)

Well established colonialismpoliticsidentityreligion

The sale

After defeating the Sikh kingdom in the First Anglo-Sikh War, the British demanded a large indemnity. The Sikh court could not pay it in full and ceded the hill lands between the Beas and the Indus, including Kashmir. Unwilling to govern them, the East India Company turned to Gulab Singh, the Dogra raja of Jammu, who had served the Sikhs but kept out of the war. By the Treaty of Amritsar of 16 March 1846, he paid 7.5 million (75 lakh) Nanakshahi rupees and became Maharaja of Jammu and Kashmir, acknowledging British supremacy with a token yearly tribute that included a horse, twelve goats and three pairs of Kashmiri shawls.

  • Hindu Rulers, Muslim Subjects: Islam, Rights, and the History of Kashmir — Mridu Rai, Princeton University Press (2004)
  • Kashmir in Conflict: India, Pakistan and the Unending War — Victoria Schofield, I.B. Tauris (2000)
  • Understanding Kashmir and Kashmiris — Christopher Snedden, Hurst (2015)

Gulab Singh and his successors went on to add Gilgit and secure Ladakh and Baltistan, creating a vast and diverse state: Muslim-majority Kashmir, Hindu-majority Jammu, Buddhist and Muslim Ladakh, and the Muslim mountain lands of the north.

  • Understanding Kashmir and Kashmiris — Christopher Snedden, Hurst (2015)

A century under the Dogras

For most Kashmiri Muslims, the Dogra century was a time of hardship. Peasants paid a heavy share of their crop in revenue and were liable for begar, forced unpaid labour, including carrying loads for the army across the mountains. Shawl weavers were taxed so heavily that in 1865 they protested in Srinagar; troops broke up the protest and several weavers drowned in a canal. A famine in 1877–79 killed a large part of the valley’s people.

  • Hindu Rulers, Muslim Subjects: Islam, Rights, and the History of Kashmir — Mridu Rai, Princeton University Press (2004)
  • The Valley of Kashmir — Walter R. Lawrence, Henry Frowde (1895)

The British official Walter Lawrence, who carried out a land settlement in the late 1880s and 1890s, wrote sympathetically of Kashmiri peasants and their poverty, and his reforms eased some burdens.

  • The Valley of Kashmir — Walter R. Lawrence, Henry Frowde (1895)
But government jobs went mainly to Dogras and Kashmiri Pandits, who were literate in Persian and later English, and Muslims had few schools. The Dogras presented themselves as Hindu rulers; cow slaughter was punishable by long imprisonment.
  • Hindu Rulers, Muslim Subjects: Islam, Rights, and the History of Kashmir — Mridu Rai, Princeton University Press (2004)
  • Languages of Belonging: Islam, Regional Identity, and the Making of Kashmir — Chitralekha Zutshi, Hurst (2004)

A Hindu state, a Muslim people

Mridu Rai argues that this was the crux: British backing allowed the Dogra kings to root their legitimacy in Hindu kingship rather than the consent of the majority, so that Kashmiri Muslims came to see their political, economic and religious grievances as one.

  • Hindu Rulers, Muslim Subjects: Islam, Rights, and the History of Kashmir — Mridu Rai, Princeton University Press (2004)
Pandits, a small minority, were caught in between: favoured in the administration, yet themselves campaigning for jobs and rights against Punjabi outsiders in the “Kashmir for Kashmiris” movement of the 1920s, which produced the State Subject laws reserving land and jobs for locals.
  • Languages of Belonging: Islam, Regional Identity, and the Making of Kashmir — Chitralekha Zutshi, Hurst (2004)
  • Understanding Kashmir and Kashmiris — Christopher Snedden, Hurst (2015)

By the 1920s, educated young Muslims returning from Aligarh and Lahore began to organise. It took a single day in July 1931 to turn grievance into a movement.

  • Kashmir: Roots of Conflict, Paths to Peace — Sumantra Bose, Harvard University Press (2003)
  • Languages of Belonging: Islam, Regional Identity, and the Making of Kashmir — Chitralekha Zutshi, Hurst (2004)

How it's seen
Kashmiri Muslim memory

The "sale deed" of 1846: a whole people sold, "the land, the water and the people", like cattle. Under the Dogras, Muslim peasants paid crushing taxes, were forced into unpaid labour (*begar*) and were shut out of government and the army, while Pandits and Dogras held office. Kashmiri Muslims were second-class subjects in their own homeland.

  • Hindu Rulers, Muslim Subjects: Islam, Rights, and the History of Kashmir — Mridu Rai, Princeton University Press (2004)
  • The Valley of Kashmir — Walter R. Lawrence, Henry Frowde (1895)
  • Kashmir: Roots of Conflict, Paths to Peace — Sumantra Bose, Harvard University Press (2003)

Dogra and Jammu view

Gulab Singh built one of the largest princely states in India by conquest and statecraft, uniting Jammu, Kashmir, Ladakh and Gilgit, and his successors brought roads, schools and reforms. Maharaja Hari Singh opened temples to Dalits and banned child marriage. The Dogra era is part of Jammu's identity.

  • Understanding Kashmir and Kashmiris — Christopher Snedden, Hurst (2015)
  • Kashmir in Conflict: India, Pakistan and the Unending War — Victoria Schofield, I.B. Tauris (2000)

Historians

Mridu Rai argues that British support allowed the Dogras to rule as Hindu kings with little need for the consent of their Muslim subjects, defining legitimacy in religious terms. Others stress that the Pandit elite also faced restrictions, and that reforms did come, especially after Lawrence's land settlement of the 1880s–90s.

  • Hindu Rulers, Muslim Subjects: Islam, Rights, and the History of Kashmir — Mridu Rai, Princeton University Press (2004)
  • Languages of Belonging: Islam, Regional Identity, and the Making of Kashmir — Chitralekha Zutshi, Hurst (2004)
  • The Valley of Kashmir — Walter R. Lawrence, Henry Frowde (1895)

Why it matters today

Kashmir

The Treaty of Amritsar created the state whose borders are still fought over, and it is the first thing many Kashmiri Muslims mention when explaining their history: "we were sold". The century of Dogra rule that followed shaped a deep sense of grievance in the valley, while in Jammu the Dogra era is remembered with pride. The 1947 dispute is in many ways a dispute over this state.